


for whom they saved the earth

by rushvalleys (breakthisspell)



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Destroy Ending, Developing Relationship, F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-02-20 00:38:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13135509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breakthisspell/pseuds/rushvalleys
Summary: Benezia once told Liara that the world is a balancing scale. Liara watches Shepard die once, twice, too many times - and she'll watch her live.





	for whom they saved the earth

Out of the corner of her eye she sees the Mako flip over - that in of itself is not a surprise. Shepard’s driving is something to behold, an urban legend on top of an urban legend herself. But then the Mako’s exhaust fumes interact with the gas in the atmosphere of whatever anonymous planet they’re on and the area around the vehicle sprouts flames. Flames, which turn to singular unified flame, which turns into a fire on the ground surrounding the Mako, Shepard flipped alongside of it.

And of course they’re precariously placed next to a bed of water, and _of course_ it’s a gas fire, and of course, Liara doesn’t know how to fix the situation other than to stand in shock and worry as guards run toward their location.

It’s not like her to feel helpless. She studies her situations from all angles. When she doesn’t know something vital, she learns it, no matter the difficulty.

“Damn it, Shepard,” Ashley sputters as she rolls through a thermal clip’s worth of bullets. “We’ve been spotted.”

“That is what you’re worried about?” Liara says.

“Uh. Yeah. Kind of.”

“But what about-”

And just like that, Shepard is barking orders once again from behind her. Kaidan takes cover just south of the gate, Garrus climbs atop a ledge to pluck mercenaries out of the air once Shepard’s forced them upward with her biotics. Liara looks back; only a char mark on the shoulder and a rough aggravation to Shepard’s tone belie that she had even been caught in a ring of flame minutes before, and before Liara can even question how, Shepard is sprinting to the gatepost and retrieving some item they need to give some collector on the Citadel in exchange for intel on Sovereign.

If she didn’t know any better, she’d say Shepard was completely indestructible. Liara thinks it as the team docks the Normandy once more, Shepard ripping off her helmet with a grunt and stripping her armor to head to the showers.

But she does know better, or at least the extranet’s carefully constructed character of Shepard tells her better. She’s survived worse than impromptu firefights - not that Liara, a scientist far, far removed from the foibles of the Systems Alliance, should have any business knowing that.

So when Shepard brings up Akuze on her own accord, she has to play some form of stupid she’s never quite had to play. Knowing things is something of a refined skill - it’s brought her degrees, accolades, enough expertise to both fund a lifetime’s worth of research and justify her short-lived tenure aboard the Normandy - she’s not used to hiding her research for the sake of niceties.

“Ash told me you were a little freaked out back there,” Shepard says with a lilt to her voice, as if she’s amused at Liara’s reaction back on the field. “The armor’s Alliance stock. Fireproof, if you know how to maneuver right.”

“And what happens if you do not know?”

Shepard shrugs. “Depends on where you are. If you’re in the Terminus System, a batarian probably makes skewers out of you.”

They sit in the med bay laboratory, eating leftover stew over rice from plastic containers. Both skipped dinner - Shepard to receive treatment from Chakwas after the fight, Liara out of habit. She much prefers to eat in her lab, away from all the loud chatter and sharing of human social customs she doesn’t quite understand enough to reciprocate. Shepard noticed, began bringing her leftovers and leaving to scan the CIC or check flight progress with Joker, then began bringing her leftovers and staying to chat, and then began skipping meals and eating leftovers alongside her in the lab. It’s strange to think of the esteemed Commander Shepard choosing to skip meals just to sit with her, tell her off-color jokes to get her to lighten up and for Goddess’ sake laugh a little. She wonders if Shepard spends this much time with the rest of their squad. She wonders if everyone feels as warm, full, cared for as she does when she speaks to Shepard.

“Anyway, I came here to ask you something,” Shepard says, foregoing her container of food to look Liara in the eye. “It’s about Benezia.”

“Yes?”

“We’re, uh. We’re heading there next. To Noveria,” she says. “You don’t have to join the field team if you don’t want to, but-”

“No,” Liara interrupts, “I mean, yes. I should join.”

“You really don’t have to, Liara.”

Liara shakes her head. “She is my mother, Shepard. I-I owe her that much”

Shepard sighs, drums her fingers on her thighs, hesitates, places a hand on Liara’s shoulder gently, more gently than Liara thought Shepard capable. “You know she’s not going to be your mother when you see her,” Shepard says warily. “She’s - I don’t know what she is. She’s whatever Saren made her into now. And it might not end well.”

“I know,” Liara says. “It probably will not end well. I know. But if I could just see-” Now, before the thought goes somewhere dark, now is where Liara should stop herself. But something about how close Shepard is to her right now, how sincere the worry in her eyes is, how she can feel Shepard’s breath on her cheek, it urges her forward. “I think I made her suffer quite a lot. Even before Saren. I disappeared from her for decades at a time. We did not see eye to eye, but I owe her more than I gave her. And if I could be there for her final moments - if that is what it comes to - maybe...maybe it would make up for that.”

“Okay,” Shepard says lightly. “But for what it’s worth, you’re her daughter. Speaking from experience, it’s our job to give our mothers a little bit of hell. Go a little easier on yourself.”

“From experience?”

Shepard nods. “My mom’s an admiral. My whole family’s military. I, uh. I got into some real trouble a few years ago, a thresher maw incident. On a planet in the middle of nowhere, Akuze. Our comms went out,” - Liara nods - ”and our CO went with them trying to get us an evac. I was the only one left of my squad - a big squad - and...you’ve read about this on the extranet, haven’t you, T’Soni?”

Liara feels the blood rush to her face. “What?”

Shepard laughs. “Relax, it’s fine. Most people hear ‘all my friends died’ and get at least a little bit punchy.”

“I-yes, I have.” Here she is, found out. She’s been dreading being called out on searching her commander since she joined the Normandy crew, and she’s spent time fabricating excuses besides sheer fascination. Her answer sounds canned, because it is canned. “I-I thought it better to know who I was serving under - you have much to do, educating a subordinate on your own personal history seemed silly, all things considered.”

“Whatever you say, Liara,” Shepard chuckles, and Liara can feel the purple of her blood boiling beneath her cheeks, heat pooling onto the back of her neck. “But anyway. When the recon team found me, it was bad. One lung punctured, I couldn’t stomach solid food for weeks - you get it.”

Liara doesn’t quite get it - she’s at her core a civilian, and though she’s fought off her fair share of pirates during her archaeological digs, she has never seen casualties on a grand scale. Not the way Shepard has. Whatever wounds Liara had procured over her hundred years of life wound be scratches to her. 

She nods along anyway as Shepard speaks, her lips pressed together in a tight line as she ponders her words. “I wasn’t declared dead or anything, but I saw the pictures, and I’ve seen my fair share of dead people. I was pretty close. And I couldn’t comm my mom or even call her from the hospital, I couldn’t talk for two, three weeks after it happened and even if I could, I wouldn’t have.”

“You did not want to hurt her, Commander. That does not seem so terrible.”

“Yeah, but it probably made her feel like shit,” she sighs. “It’s hard. Having people you care about. Being in danger all the time.”

Shepard’s hand has long left her shoulder, but her eyes still stay locked with Liara’s. She has the impulse to reach out, to touch her palm to the back of Shepard’s hand where it lies on the lab counter, to say she understands, because against her better judgement she goes limp when she sees Shepard on the losing end of a fight, because - because she’s her commander, of course. That’s the only logical reason. She’s given her this opportunity to meet her oldest demon head-on and flex her hard-earned knowledge of the Protheans in the process. She’s taught her how to fight, physically, but also how to hold herself with the confidence only someone with the lives of many on their back can learn. She has taught her so much in so little time, and information is power. 

This is what she tells herself.

Really, she is afraid that there’s something - love, lust, admiration, _something_ \- that Shepard makes her feel that she’s never felt, and if Shepard were to leave, she may never feel it so intensely again. It’s taken her over a century to find someone she’s found herself looking forward to spending time with after a long mission, someone she finds herself fantasizing about eating stale rehydrated beef stews every night for the foreseeable future, someone who makes her act and feel like a young maiden and not a matronly archaeology professor from her university days. She doesn’t know what this feeling is, but it’s a good one. Great, even. It would be a shame for it to end before anything comes of it, even if she does have a millenia to try and replicate it.

She settles for a quick brush of her hand against Shepard’s arm. “You are doing the best that you can, Shepard.”

“Yeah, I hope so.”

“How often do you speak to your father, then?” Liara asks. “You said he is also in the Alliance.”

“Was,” Shepard says, and Liara can’t help but feel stupid. All the searches she’d done on Shepard, all the research she’s done on her military career, and she’d forgotten to even look into her family life. 

“I did not mean-“

“It’s okay,” Shepard says with a long exhale. “He died in action. I was a teenager. But he wouldn’t have taken what happened on Akuze well, I'm guessing.”

“I am sorry, Shepard,” Liara starts, “I had no idea.”

Shepard shrugs. “It happens. You know, it’s funny. Growing up on ships, you hear about really terrible stuff happening to Alliance families, how your cohort leader’s daughter or your friend’s brother was killed in action - you never expect to be the next one. But one day it’s gotta be you. No matter how good your dad is or how lucky you’ve been up until that day.”

Liara nods slowly. “I’m glad he was a good man, at least.”

“Yeah, he was,” Shepard says somberly. 

“I never met my father,” Liara offers. “All I know is that she is also an asari.”

“I’m sorry too, then.”

“It is alright, Commander,” Liara says. “If I never knew her it can’t be such a big loss.”

“I mean, her loss,” Shepard smiles as she gets up to throw out her food’s container into the receptacle. “If you were my mom’s kid, she’d never stop bragging about you. I mean, she loves to brag about her kid, but still. I didn’t get a doctorate.”

“I do not need to remind you,” Liara replies, “I’m not the commander of my own ship.”

Shepard laughs. “Fair, fair. Anyway, I have to debrief Hackett about this last field mission. Same time tomorrow?”

Liara nods, and Shepard calls out, “it’s a date” as she exits. Liara hates how her heart flutters as she watches Shepard leave. Not a wholly appropriate way to view one’s commander. Not one that’s earned her place here by being swept off of death’s door, and certainly not the first human Spectre.

It’s not in good taste, Liara knows, and Shepard is a militant woman. She’s focused on the task at hand, not on humoring the brew of emotions bubbling inside Liara. 

So, she concedes that Shepard didn’t come back from the relatively dead to waste her Spectreship wooing her, and brings herself to her work desk once more.

*

It’s strange to be back.

Not bad, certainly not bad at all, but strange. The ship is so different - of course, as it’s quite literally a different model, made by Cerberus rather than the Alliance - but the energy of the crew, of her old friends, has hardly changed. She exchanges hugs and falls into easy conversation with her past squadmates, and nods curtly at Miranda as she tours the ship, feeling both strangely at home but strangely alien as she enters Shepard’s quarters once again.

She’s reminded of how much she’s changed in two years. The last time she joined Shepard in her cabin she was young, naive, and so fully in love with Shepard that she was blindsided from any future tragedy. Two years is meant to pass in what feels like a second to most asari, but the past two years wore Liara down, crawled forward as if she had put her feet on the ground while the universe dragged her by the wrists. There was a point aboard the Normandy she felt unstoppable - at her physical peak, lean and muscular and well-rested under Shepard’s quiet but consistent urging that she leave the lab and get some sleep. Not so much now, as purplish bags gnaw at the skin under her eyes, a product of paranoid insomnia and working too late too often. Shepard being alive didn’t make her forget any of this as she thought it might - there were days back on Ilium where she thought that maybe, if she could just know if and when Shepard would be revived, living and breathing, the throbbing of her head would stop, she could make it through a night without being woken by her home terminal beeping obtrusively or her own anxiety fueled dreams.

It only seems as if, once the initial excitement has passed, after she and Shepard spoke of blue children and touched and talked and joined, somehow she is in a fever dream. It doesn’t seem real. It doesn’t seem real because it _can’t_ be real. Liara watched her die. 

And she has watched her die over and over and over again, at the slightest provocation. At the screeching of two cars against each other outside her office window in a traffic accident mid-air, as she forgets to look away as she lights a candle and watches the flame engulf the wick the same way it engulfed the SR1, when she looks out into same night sky that enveloped and took Shepard away from her.

It should have melted away, the trauma, the sadness. But as she lies next to Shepard, her arm across her torso as she sleeps on her stomach, she thinks of how lucky and how horribly unlucky she is to have seen her first and only love die, only to come back by a medical miracle two excruciatingly long years later, and for it to seem like nothing more than a lucid fantasy.

She runs her fingers through Shepard’s hair, loose around her face, and somehow that’s enough to bring two years of grief to the surface, to unlock two years’ worth of repressed rage and anguish and pain as she sobs into the crook of Shepard’s neck.

She doesn’t know how long it’s been when she feels Shepard’s arms wrap around her, sitting up against the headboard and bringing Liara along with her. They sit for a while, Shepard rubbing at her back with one arm as the other hugged her close, Liara’s sobs buried into Shepard’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Shepard croons softly, sleep heavy in her voice, “hey, it’s okay.”

Liara nods slowly. She pulls away just long enough to wipe at her eyes and look at Shepard’s shoulder, the glisten of her own tears on bare skin somehow sobering.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry. It’s just-” Liara’s breaths are jagged, she’s nauseated from crying. It’s hard to speak without sounding like a toddler in the midst of tantrum.

Shepard brings a hand forward to cup her face gently, then wipe at the tears still forming in Liara’s eyes. “It’s okay.”

“You-I-I saw you die, Shepard.”

“Yeah.”

“You _died,_ ” Liara says quietly, “and I couldn’t stop it.”

“I’m back,” Shepard says, earnestly, as she pries Liara’s arms from around her neck to entwine her fingers with hers, “and you did that.”

Liara nods as Shepard brings her hand to her mouth, kisses the back of her hand, her wrist, moves closer to kiss her cheek, the tip of her nose, the groove under her eye where tears have fallen. 

“And I’m here now,” Shepard adds in a whisper, kissing the furrowed lines on her forehead. 

“I know,” Liara says. “It’s been a long two years is all.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Liara shrugs. “You don’t need to apologize. It isn’t your fault. You couldn’t help what happened.”

“I-no. I should have comm’ed you right away. Right after I got back on the Normandy. You deserved to know, but I-I don’t know why I didn’t.”

Liara leans back into Shepard, resting her head on her chest as she feels Shepard’s arms envelop her again. “And what? You would have found out I’m an information broker now? That I threaten people for intel for a living? Things have changed a lot, it would have just made you more confused.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So it worked out the way it was meant to,” Liara concedes. “That’s some relief.”

“It is.” Shepard says. “You have changed a lot.”

Liara grimaces. “I know.”

“I just mean you were pretty green a few years ago,” Shepard chuckles.

“I wouldn’t call it green,” Liara says with a sigh. “I knew a lot of things. Just not...things relevant to working on the Normandy, it turns out.”

“You’re saying infinite knowledge about the Protheans didn’t get you into the captain’s quarters?” Shepard laughs. “I don’t know, knowledge is a pretty big turn on for a lot of people.”

Liara rolls her eyes. “You know what I meant.”

“Yeah. You’ve changed,” Shepard says. “But it’s good. It suits you. You know what you want and how to get it. It’s-I’m proud of you.”

“I learned from the best,” Liara replies almost involuntarily. And she means it - Shepard didn’t change who she was, but she encouraged what Liara had always liked about herself. She admired her determination, her strategic thinking, her wit when she dared use it in a verbal battle with Shepard or one of their squadmates.

“You’re flattering me,” Shepard says. 

“I don’t flatter anymore, Shepard.”

She laughs. “Anymore.”

When Liara looks up to kiss her, and when Shepard lowers them both down to deepen it, to run her hand across Liara’s side, back, up and down her chest, it feels like almost no time has passed. She’s young and naive and in love with the way her and Shepard exhale and inhale together, how the rough and tumble golden child of the Alliance, first human Spectre can melt underneath her, how Shepard at her most vulnerable and most private is hers, one hundred percent hers, and nothing, not even death itself, could take that away from her.

Liara sighs when it’s time to pull away, rests her head against Shepard’s chest once again. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t want tonight to turn into this.”

“You had other plans? Because we did everything I wanted to do,” Liara knows that Shepard only wants to ease the mood - she’s never past innuendo, but a calculated joke, blue or otherwise, in the middle of heavy moments was a card she played often. Not to much avail tonight.

“No, I-I’ve thought about this before, is all,” Liara admits. “The hope that one day Cerberus would keep their word and we’d find each other again. I didn’t expect it to be so…”

“Sad?” Shepard offers. Liara nods. “Yeah, well. That’s what happens when I go off and die. Sorry about that.”

Liara shrugs. “More incentive to keep you alive the next time.”

A moment passes, and what is unsaid fills the space around them. Shepard’s suicide mission is heavy in the air with whatever is on the other side of the Omega 4 Relay. “I love you,” Liara says. “And if your new squad can’t bring you back in one piece, I have access to their exact coordinates on my ship.”

Her ship. Still strange that the Shadow Broker’s ship is hers now, it’s her possession and as the new Shadow Broker she considers it such.

“Big talk, T’Soni,” Shepard says, dreamily, half asleep. “Love you too. But don’t kill anyone, please.”

Morning comes, and Shepard tells Garrus to grab an extra seat for Liara at breakfast. Liara anticipates feeling awkward about it, seeing Shepard’s team old and new after without it looking scandalous, like they had consummated their reignited relationship the night prior. Which, to be fair, they had, but no one needed to be privy to that but herself and Shepard. She scrambles out in extra fatigues from the back of Shepard’s closet to the mess hall while Shepard is in the shower, fiddling with her omni-tool on the elevator ride up to autopilot her ship to the Normandy’s drop point.

“So,” she hears a woman’s voice start, raspy and low. “Shepard’s gal pal is here, huh?”

Garrus scoffs. “Yes, and she’s an old friend, so don’t get smart and scare her away.”

“Please. You think I give a rat’s ass about what or who Shepard does in her spare time?” The woman continues. “You flatter her.”

Garrus stifles a chuckle with a groan in response, and Liara makes her way to the mess table and greets him and Tali, politely waves at the faces she doesn’t recognize.

“This is Jack,” Garrus explains, “she didn’t get enough love in her childhood, and she likes to take it out on all of us now.”

“ _Garrus,_ ” Tali scolds with a swat to his arm. “There’s Jacob, Thane, Kasumi - and I guess that’s it for now,” she says, and Liara realizes how much she missed the metallic ring of Tali’s voice through her mask filters. She forgot how much she missed Garrus’ humor, the natural banter that flowed between the three of them, cultivated once Liara got to know the two of them better aboard the SR1. Shepard joins shortly after, and if Liara closes her eyes, she can imagine the strangers at the table to be Ashley, Kaidan, Wrex. For a moment time is still, and she is at home.

But of course, this isn’t her home now. She wishes it could be, but if the Shadow Broker goes offline for more than a few hours at a time it could leave a mess that would take weeks to clean up. Goddess forbid an agent delivering invaluable intel get killed because she couldn’t tell them which ambassador bought what.

And then when it’s time to leave, when the Normandy touches down and she boards her own ship, it is even stranger than it was to return. She has heard that the Normandy is one of the most majestic ships from the Systems Alliance, but being there to watch it leave is foreign to her. Most Alliance frigates she had seen near Thessia were older models, prone to overheating and clunky off the ground, but she is struck by just how beautiful the Normandy is in flight, even Cerberus’ model of it. It glides quickly, quietly for a ship its size, its silver exterior shining from quite a distance away. Amazing, she thinks, how innocuous it looks from far away - no one who doesn’t need to know knows what precious cargo it holds.

Shepard flies out of sight, and Liara gets to work.

*

Benezia once told Liara that the world is a balancing scale. Asari religion says every bit of personhood inside of Liara, Benezia, their extended network of friends and family, has belonged to an asari before them, reincarnated through space and time. All the energy in the world stays in the world, all the good evens out all the bad, every act of injustice is met with an act of justice somewhere, some time.

If that is true, the new world should be something to behold. Too much pain, frustration, loss went into its rebirth for it not to emerge something beautiful.

There is only so much the Shadow Broker can do to help pool resources toward Earth when her terminals are lodged somewhere in the ruins of central Europe with no power. Call her crazy, paranoid, cynical about the world’s fate, but she had copied each piece of information which went in and out of the Shadow Broker’s main network for this exact purpose, but it is months before London can sustain the energy output needed for her computers and its growing number of ground hospitals and emergency facilities. The important files live in her datapads, and the unimportant ones have petered out naturally - there is no important somebody planets away scouring for dirt on the enemy when their homeworld is in shambles.

The reason for the scans and copies is, as it all really was, for Shepard.

It started out as a selfish side project of hers, mapping out Miranda’s plans for Project Lazarus via her network in case they needed to start from scratch. Seeing who in the world exported such high quality skin grafts. Where in the world replacement biotic amps could be installed.

Then came Shepard’s brave, stupid - mostly stupid - barrage through Omega. The coup on the Citadel. Thessia. It stopped being a side project and started being a necessity to keep the small bit of sanity she had. She had done nothing to save her homeworld. But Shepard is flesh and bone and if she could be rebuilt once, she could be rebuilt again. Liara could save her.

And, miraculously, it had paid off. It takes Shepard six months to leave London’s ground hospital and another four before all the required surgeries come to an end, and she’ll have years of physical therapy to bring her mobility back to what it once was. 

Miranda stays behind on Earth to oversee Shepard’s recovery. Liara knows her to be practical, efficient, one to do the job and do it as quickly and meticulously as possible. So she’s not surprised that she’s planned Shepard’s therapy regimen to the minute, but she _is_ shocked at the slow pace of it. Humans are fragile, sure, but the delicacy with which Miranda handles Shepard now is startling.

“She’s my handiwork,” Miranda shrugs once when they’re alone, “it’s a point of pride, really. If I break my magnum opus because she wants to do pull ups off the door frame, I’ll feel like an idiot.”

Liara only smiles to herself. Knows Miranda would never say it, but she owes Shepard something fierce - they all did, savior of the galaxy and all - and shows her thanks in giving her a third chance at life.

“Plus,” she says, “if I patch up the Alliance’s number one, they’ll pardon my time with Cerberus. And it would be nice to live on Earth. The start of it all for us.”

“Not with your sister?” Liara asks.

“No,” Miranda says, “she has her own family. She doesn’t need me hovering around.”

Liara knows, sees in Shepard’s disgruntled glare as human nurses talk about vids, as Liara turns on the news in their cramped apartment to London time, that Shepard hates spending time on Earth. It’s where only awful things have happened to her, she says, where her mother grounded them for months when her father died on-duty and where she served house arrest after Aratoht. Liara didn’t blame her aversion.

So when, sixteen months out, she tells Liara she wants to leave for Chicago, Liara is caught off guard.

“My mom’s there,” she explains one morning, pouring coffee as Liara scrolls through a datapad. Liara pretends not to notice how her hand trembles from the weight of the coffee pot and how she presses herself to the counter to support herself. “She’s from there, so she’s got an apartment. It’s one of the few places that didn’t get wrecked.”

“Which means that it _did_ get wrecked, but it’s a docking city for North America, so it was patched up first,” Liara guesses.

“Correct.” Shepard nods as she limps toward Liara to bring her her coffee, one sugar and two cream, and takes a moment to wrap her arms around her torso from behind and peck at her cheek. “Anyway, I thought I - we - should make the rounds. You know, get to see everyone important. I’ve gone off the grid from them for a full year.”

Liara argues that it’s only because Shepard spent a substantial portion of the past year unconscious on surgeons’ tables, but it seems a suitable reward for a year and a half of pure and continuous difficulty. 

They find lodging in a private room in the dry dock refugee camp - turned hostel during the current era of reconstruction, there simply wasn’t the housing to hold everyone coming and going to one of North America’s few ports. There’s barely walking room, just a cramped bathroom and a main room big enough for a twin bed and not much else. Liara is familiar.

“This reminds me of Feron. We went through Omega posing as refugees.” She kicks of her shoes and dresses down, shoving her day clothes under the bed. Not much room on the ground for extemporaneous mess.

“Huh,” Shepard grunts as she lowers herself gingerly onto the bed. “How’s he doing?”

“I heard from him a few weeks back, so I guess alright,” Liara says. “Move over.”

Shepard shuffles to one side of the mattress, leaving Liara a slender half. “I have to say, I’m surprised he wanted to work with you after finding out you’re a chronic cover hog.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Liara says with a roll of her eyes, too tired to feign an argument. Traveling after so long in one place exhausts her. Part of her likes being sedentary, having a home for her and Shepard to come back to, but the other part of her misses feeling like a maiden should, exploring the world and stocking up on “once in a lifetime” experiences while she was still limber and senile enough to remember them.

They fall into a silence, Shepard’s chest to Liara’s back. It’s a good position - Liara can feel Shepard’s inhale and exhale on her shoulder blade. Each one feels like a celebration of its own.

“Hey,” Shepard says. She speaks softly, but it breaks through the quiet all the same. “I don’t mean anything by this, I’m just wondering-“

“About?”

“Did you and Feron ever-”

Liara exhales. “No. We didn’t.”

Shepard swears idle curiosity, but Liara feels her hold her just a bit closer against her, as if she’s claiming her territory. “No? Close quarters, tense and emotional mission, you never needed to blow off some steam?”

“I was waiting for you. It felt wrong.”

“Not yet,” Shepard counters, “you didn’t run into Miranda until late in the game. And I could tell he was into you.”

“You could.”

“I mean, isn’t everyone? Everyone with taste,” Shepard says, “and I saw the stuff he kept in the Broker ship. He has taste.”

“I don’t know about that - the part about me, not about Feron. I don’t know what you’re trying to uncover here, I don’t have any secret liasons you don’t know about.”

“Not trying to uncover here, I’ve just always wondered, I guess.” And Shepard adds, in barely more than a whisper, “you’re allowed to be happy, you know. With or without me around. I want you to be.”

Neither of them breathe when Liara rolls over to look at Shepard. “Drell have incredibly short lifespans. Eighty years, eighty five at most.”

“I didn’t think that mattered to asari,” Shepard says.

“It usually doesn’t,” Liara replies slowly, staring at the pattern of the sheets in the small space between herself and Shepard to avoid meeting Shepard’s eye. Paisley. An interesting choice. 

“I couldn’t let myself get attached to somebody else if they were going to die so quickly,” Liara says. 

“Oh.”

“So I think that’s why I never wanted to.” Liara shrugs into a lazy embrace with Shepard, head at her chest, arm crossed around her waist. “It was too soon after - well, you know.”

It should feel like an old wound by now, sore if prodded for too long but generally easy to the touch, but after the watching in helpless horror as Shepard activated the Catalyst, it’s open and bleeding once again. Trauma brought forth more trauma, hers and Shepard’s woven into each other’s after years of sharing their lives with one another.

“Sorry,” Shepard relents. “I didn’t mean to rehash any of that. I didn’t want to make you upset.” She caresses Liara’s outermost crest, moves to the next inward, the next inward, the next inward, slowly but deliberately.

“You’re here now,” Liara mumbles into her chest. “But I don’t have it in me to do this a third time, Shepard.”

Shepard chuckles. “Duly noted.”

They drive out in a rental car the next morning - Shepard curses how rough the drive of the model is despite not actually being the one behind the wheel - and Glyph feeds Liara directions as she drives.

Shepard peppers the trip - forty minutes including traffic, mostly trucks carrying rations cross-state - with what she knows of human history, the scraps of information she’s gathered about Chicago over the years, with some talk of the future, even. Getting out of London’s bubble of doctors and hovering Alliance officials looks good on her, Liara concedes.

“My mom grew up toward the north, Roger’s Park, I think it was called. I don’t think it even exists now. Well, before all the Reaper stuff,” Shepard narrates. “There’s a beach along the lake, growing up it was my favorite part of being back here. I always wanted to have kids and bring them there to see it. But, I don’t know. Beaches kind of suck now.”

Liara nods - Virmire, she acknowledges - but besides herself breaks a smile. Shepard prods her. “What?”

Liara smirks. “You being a child, wanting to have children. I think it’s nice, is all.”

“Still want them, T’Soni,” Shepard says.

“How fortunate for you then,” Liara teases, “that I do too.”

She laughs. “Yeah, it’s like we planned it that way or something.”

Shepard laughs much more now, more now that she’s gotten back on her feet, in the interim time between finishing the brunt of her recovery and reentering the public eye. She opens the window and Earthen summer beats down on her shoulders, wind tousles her hair. She looks at Liara with a soft smile as she drives, feeling the elements of the world she saved against her skin. It’s been rare for Shepard to find moments of pure happiness within the past year, but Liara likes to think the months they have to themselves now are making them more frequent. 

Glyph tells her to take the next exit off Lake Shore Drive, and in the next minute Shepard is using one arm to prop herself up against Liara, the other on her walker. Hannah greets them at the door, finding the balance between crushing Shepard in a hug and taking account of her frailty before giving Liara a warm, appreciative hello.

“You hungry?” Hannah asks as she leads Shepard to the couch. “I’ve got food in the fridge.”

“That’s a trick question, Li,” Shepard grunts as she sits, “she can’t cook for shit. She can’t boil pasta without turning it to toxic waste.”

“Oh, don’t listen to her,” Hannah says. “Plus, it’s takeout. So knock yourself out.”

Liara chuckles. She’s met Shepard’s mother a handful of times, never under necessarily pleasant circumstances. They consoled each other when Shepard had reached a lull in her progress around month one, when she would come in and out of consciousness for no reason in particular after a week of stability, when her vitals dropped seemingly out of nowhere. They’d met before during Shepard’s house arrest, Hannah rendezvousing with Hackett when they were both planetside on Mars - awkwardly acknowledging that they knew who the other was, shaking hands, and parting ways.

But now the tension is gone, and while Shepard is still weak, she’s stable. She’s talking, she’s walking, she’s teasing Liara about this and that, she’s _breathing._ Liara isn’t one for hyperbolics, but she sees Shepard as a living miracle at this point. Even if this miracle is spending her vacation time bickering with her mother about which Alliance personnel needs to get a kick to the groin the fastest. 

“Feel like since you’re the one who brought it up, Mom,” Shepard says, “the answer’s you.”

“Don’t get smart, kid. I brought you into this world, you know-”

“-you’ll take me out of it, yeah Mom, sure. But don’t dish it out if you can’t take it,” Shepard says tauntingly.

It’s so different than Liara and Benezia ever were, two of the most headstrong women in the galaxy from the same bloodline, who poked and prodded at each other yet were such perfect complements. Hannah would have fought tooth and nail for her daughter if she had to - she didn’t, Liara did - which is why, Liara guesses, Hannah holds her in such high regard.

She asks Liara how she’s doing, how she’s really doing, when Shepard lies down for a nap midday. Liara can only shrug and say that she’s doing better, but the work isn’t done.

“I trust you,” Hannah says with confidence, “I know you’re taking care of her. And I know it’s not easy.”

Liara smiles. “It’s not. But it’s worth it.”

“It sure is,” Hannah says. “And - if I haven’t said it already - thanks, Liara. Really.”

Liara watches Shepard sleep in the guest bedroom, scars over tender skin, prosthetic where limb once was, a short cut of hair replacing long, tangled curls. And it’s different, of course it is. It’s strange that Shepard is now the one to lean against her for protection. It’s funny that this is the same woman she spent her tenure aboard the SR1 fawning over - the same one who she now organizes pills and medication for each morning, who groans as Liara wakes her to start her PT for the day.

Liara figures they have over a hundred good years together - more, if Miranda’s prototypes from Project Lazarus are to be believed. And that’s not a lot, relatively speaking, but it’s enough.

It’s all strange, different, and confusing, but Shepard breathes, and each breath is Liara’s reward for fighting the good fight, day after day, year after year.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to @keelificent and @grandemalion on Twitter for looking this over!
> 
> As you probably gleamed, my Shepard is a Spacer/Sole Survivor, also a paragon and vanguard.
> 
> I threw this together in a couple of days because I love Shiara so so much and there isn't a lot of content out there. Enjoy!


End file.
